I deeply believe that the News providers in the Internet as we know them today (e.g websites of news papers, TV stations, ..) will change completely in the near future. Sites like them can only provide very abstract content because of the big differences in their customers. The problem here is that these providers have only very limited time to provide content dedicated to special needs.
I never liked or used features like digg, del.icio.us or Stumple. In my opinion they could not work because they need further investigation from the user. If we take a closer look to news i would argue that there is a much more intuitive way to let others now about your favorite news - sharing.
Take a little look a the figure below. Lets assume that the bigger cyan bullets are users and the smaller blue ones are communication channels for shared news items the base of course are several news feeds of the web. If such channels can be used as input channels the persons that provide them can be seen as filter units of information.
At the moment Google Reader supports one channel of every person (account) in my opinion this is not very practicable at all. Normally persons are not just interested in one area. Tagging is a very common method for organizing informations. I would like to see that Google provides a possibility to share also icons for specialize tags. An other type of categorization may be the importance of news. Information that is more important (maybe stared could be an indicator for the Google Reader) can be provided on an different channel too.With such an infrastructure every user will be able to select the information channels he wants to subscribe much better. Of course every one can choose if he will be a content provider or not. In the picture above we don't see if the information that flows over the channels is more generalized or specialized. This depends on the content providers and the subscribers.
In this first stage i was just taking about sharing content. Several days ago i came across the Website of share.opml.org which i think could be very useful. At the moment most of the readers do not have the possibility to publish the opml file of their current subscriptions.
The orange points are now the publishing channels of the opml file. As you can see there are several persons that are much more interested in the content that is read by others that they even use their subscriptions as input for their information unit which means that they subscribe to the same channels.In this figure i have also removed the base of old news feeds because there is no base any more. It doesn't make any difference if the content provider is a Blog a old school News website or an person filtering content for you.
2 comments:
Maybe I misunderstand the problem, but is this not only another side of the same coin? The primary reason for social networks is that we need, and appreciate, some kind of filter either by people we trust or by communities who are sharing our own interests. In the infant days of the internet this were link lists on your first homepage or IRC channels. RSS makes the broadcasting a bit easier and with the first generation of social sites, like digg.com, the community share their opinion of the importance of an news snippet. More sophisticated applications like Yahoo! Pipes let you mash up a lot of more sources to your own news service.
Yes, one channel my be not enough, but the basic principle is the same, only who and with which scope they are realized is different. The important point is that they work in "pull" fashion and the users decide who they trust and what they think is important. This is not a replacement for good journalism, it is a complement.
I don't think it will be a replacement for good journalism, further more there will be areas where other content providers become more important than journalists. E.g. take the current situation in our industry. I can't see that much journalists providing content for software developers any more.
What i wanted to show is that we need new mechanism to filter information and i believe sharing is a very intuitive and good one. An other will be systems like AideRSS.
(btw. thanks for the link). There will be other tools that makes it easier to filter the huge amount of news some will be human (sharing) some will be automatic.
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